SaaS Forces Alignment between Customers’ Success and Socialtext’s Success

During the past month, I’ve spoken with a lot of analysts, journalists, bloggers, customers, and prospects about the great momentum in our business and explaining the underlying reasons for our success. One topic I always emphasize is Socialtext’s business model, which is all SaaS (Software as a Service). In the software industry, the term SaaS can mean many different things. To me, it means that all our contracts with customers are on a subscription (usually 12 month term) basis.

Many folks (investors especially) like the SaaS model — and its “gift that keeps on giving” annuity feature, but that’s only true when renewal and retention rates are sufficiently high to cover the costs of customer acquisition and support. For Socialtext, the good news is that we’ve been in business long enough to be in what I call the “SaaS economic leverage zone.” What I mean by that is our renewal revenues are a healthy chunk of our ongoing business, and our renewal rates have increased by an order of magnitude during the past two years. I’m really proud of this achievement. It can be attributed to the combination of major product enhancements, coupled with more pedestrian operational improvements, including faster contract-to-launch times , improved coordination with customers pre-launch (often pre-contract), and more intimate partnerships with our customers throughout their lifecycle.

Adhering to this this SaaS model has great benefits for us and our customers. Here are some of the benefits we have seen and what about the Socialtext offering that’s different than other vendors out there:

SaaS forces alignment

What I love the most about this business model is that it completely aligns my team with the goals of our customers. If our customers don’t realize the value from our platform that they were expecting, then they just won’t renew. If they do find value, they renew. If they achieve results beyond their expectations, they’ll increase their Socialtext footprint. The best testament to our progress on this front is that our business from customer expansions tripled in Q3 and Q4 of 2009 vs. our previous average.

Socialtext’s appliance is secure on-premise SaaS

For Socialtext, “SaaS” does not have to mean “cloud-based solution.” While we offer a shared hosted service like other SaaS vendors, we also provide our customers the option of deploying via an on-premises Socialtext appliance. This secure, behind-the-firewall, 1U rackable box is easily integrated into the customer’s existing datacenter (and enterprise directories, backup, etc.). It comes pre-configured, so there is nothing to download, install, or configure. Our Services team works with the customer to schedule monthly updates which are pushed down to the appliance, requiring no time or cost of administration on the customer side. Finally, for those customers who want the privacy of a single-tenant service, but don’t (yet) have a datacenter of their own, we also offer a “hosted appliance” option. It provides all the benefits of the appliance model combined with the convenience of having the server hosted by Socialtext.

It’s all about customer success and business value

The official job titles for our team members that work with customers during their deployment is “Customer Success Manage.” This isn’t just fancy business card blather – these people are measured and goaled on pretty much the same metrics that our customers use to measure their deployment success – timeframes, usage metrics, and most importantly, business value. Our software is fully instrumented to measure a wide range of user activity, and these reports are shared (assuming the customer gives us access) between the customer team and our team during our periodic scheduled update calls.

By contrast, vendors who continue to follow the perpetual license sales model will continue to be motivated to sell you as many seats as possible up front, which I believe is why there are so many Enterprise 2.0 Adoption “support groups” out there, and why that topic dominates many of the industry conferences and forums.

Customer-Driven Innovation

I’ve often used the line “the best ideas come from your smartest customers – are you organized to listen?” A great deal of our product enhancements and innovations have come from feedback and suggestions from our customers – not just in the form of feature requests on a one-off basis, but rather in the context of an ongoing relationship we are proud to build with them. One example is the way Socialtext’s new groups capability works the same way whether you are using groups defined in your corporate LDAP/Active Directory or setting up ad hoc groups for cross-functional teams.

We only succeed if you do

An amazing amount has been written about the SaaS model and why it’s good for customers. These include lower up front costs, better matching your expenses with adoption and deployment, reduced risk, less capital needs to self-host software, and lower IT headcount requirements (to name a few). But I think the biggest advantage is that your vendor only succeeds if you do.

Enterprise 2.0 adoption, enterprise social software, SaaS, Socialtext Appliance

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